STACKING SOFTWARE FOR MACRO PHOTOGRAPHY ISO

In such cases you need a quick hand and a good lens mounted flash (and you can forget about focus stacking).īut a tripod is an item definitely worth considering. If you are shooting active subjects - bugs and the like - a tripod will be again a hindrance, as it takes time to set up. If you are feeling cheap buy a sack of rice and rest your camera on it. In such cases a beanbag is easier to carry around.

It does not necessarily mean a tripod - if you are shooting subjects close to the ground level a tripod would actually get into your way. Pics low-res jpg, shrunk on page - larger if you right click & open image in new tab.Ī sturdy support is essential in still macro photography. I can see no way I could have got this handheld. Single Alium bud, approx 2mm 50mm F16 1/40s on perhaps 30-40mm extension 4 layer stack. This could have been done handheld if I'd gone faster than 1/40s, with a squeeze & lean. Personally, I'm still undecided on whether I prefer a rail or pulling focus manually, I've been experimenting with both.Īlso, at that kind of magnification, merely putting the tripod on carpet rather than concrete floor means you can push the camera further than your entire focus stack with the weight of one finger, so you can't be touching the camera at the time & will need a remote release & mirror-up delay to minimise shake.Įntire Alium head approx 10-12cm diameter 185mm f16 1/40s, 3 layer stack In fact at those kind of distances & sizes, merely finding your subject in the viewfinder can be quite a task, let alone finding exactly the same bit again for a 2nd attempt.Īt that point you need a tripod & possibly even a macro focussing rail. You are also going to need a whole lot more slices than with your gigantic football & 3m distance to subject. At that, your chances of holding still long enough to get a single slice went right out of the window. If you have a 70mm lens on 68mm of extension tube to capture a 2mm flower bud or a fly etc, you will be about 5-10mm from your subject with a DoF of maybe 0.5mm. It's very much going to depend on 'how macro is macro' - for instance capturing a stationary football on a 150mm lens is going to take you maybe two attempts at the 'squeeze & lean' method to get the 2 or 3 raw images you'd need to stack. I've found already, just using Photoshop's built-in stacking tools that unless you have a very steady hand & can takes fast bursts of multiple images just using a 'breathing' or 'squeeze & lean' technique to shift your plane of focus slightly across the burst, then you're going to have no hope at all. I find that a setting of 3 works well, so I leave it at that.I've not yet graduated to Helicon Focus, though I'm open to persuasion at the moment. Change any of these and your depth of field changes as well. There are too many variables at play for depth of field - the lens, focal length, distance to subject, and aperture. I am often asked if each FD can be translated into a quantifiable depth of field. The greater the focus differential setting, the more the focusing element in the lens moves between shots.

Focus Differential - 3 This seems to be the sweet spot so I never change it.

Number of bracketed shots - 8 This is usually ample and you could get away with fewer.

Focus Point - single point, positioned over your closest foreground object.

Aperture - usually between f/5.6 and f/7.1.

STACKING SOFTWARE FOR MACRO PHOTOGRAPHY ISO

ISO - 200 Depending on lighting conditions I may increase the ISO, but I never use AutoISO.

Mode - Aperture Priority (almost all of my landscape images are shot in A).

It has a minimum focusing distance of 20cm and a field of view of up to 115°. Regardless of which OMD camera body I happen to be using, my goto lens for this type of photography is the 7-14mm f/2.8 PRO.

As mentioned earlier a tripod can be useful, but to be honest, the image stabilization of the OMD line-up is so good that I often forego the tripod. This will give me the field of view needed to capture the foreground, horizon and sky. Many of these images were also shot in vertical orientation and with the camera tilted down at about a 45-degree angle. For many of the images in this article the front lens element was about 6 inches away from the foreground subject. I opt to use focus bracketing/stacking when the foreground lacks larger points of interest and I want to accentuate the details of smaller foreground subjects like ice crystals, sea shells, small rocks, leaves, flowers, etc. Here is a breakdown of how I go about using this feature. Although the scene may be substantially different from one location to another, the method by which I use focus bracketing/stacking remains fairly consistent.

Stacking software for macro photography